What is an Online Community Manager?

It is the biggest question in newly exposed markets (like China) and corporate entities who wants to enter a new market or jump into the bandwagon, but doesn’t know what it is really about. Typically the “we want to be successful like them, so we need to have people and positions that they have”.

An Online Community Manager is one of the key to success in having a business today – online or offline. But simply creating a position without any knowledge about it or approaching it simply as “PR work” will only make it useless or hurt you in the long-run. Whether you like or not, you have a community, wrong execution could spell disaster.

Dawn Foster created a presentation of what an Online Community Manager is all about – why it is needed, what to do, and what to avoid. “Yes, It’s Really a Job” and not just another job title.

But before I show you the slides, here are some selected points.

What do we do?

Ongoing Facilitation

Content Creation

Evangelism

Community Evolution

What Skills do we need?

Patience

Networking

Communication

Facilitation

Technical Skills

Marketing

Self-Motivation

Workaholic Tendencies

Organization

Guiding Principles: It’s All About the People

Focus on the individuals: Participate as a person, not a corporate drone

Be Sincere: Sincerity = believability and credibility

Not all about you: Community is about conversation, which is by definition two-way

Be a Part of the Community: Don’t try to control the community

Everyone’s a Peer: You are not the expert; knowledge comes from everywhere

What Makes a Community Work?

Promotional No-No’s

Do not promote your community on competitor’s sites (slimy)

Do not use social media (twitter, facebook, blogs, etc.) with the sole purpose of pimping. Example, talking about your ideas, thoughts, and products with a personal spin (what YOU are doing) [my addition: or spamming people via social media (friendster, multiply, myspace, etc.)]

What Makes a Community Work?

Open, inclusive and transparent

Listening to good and bad feedback

Actively engaged in the community

Encouraging new members

Making it easy for people to participate

Integration into other relevant areas of the site

Responding to criticism (never deleting negative comments)

Communities to Avoid

Community is lip service, not a serious endeavor

Community software / configuration / policies that get in the way of collaboration

Is a self-confessed bibliophile and technophile other than being an early adopter, an avid gamer, a geek, nerd, role-player, anime otaku, and trekker.

His first online project was in 1998 when he launched the unofficial website for Ansalon MUD (a text-based, telnet online game) and his own community forums Laibcoms.Community. By 2003 he created his work blog GM-Yukino which grew into gameshogun™, Snoworld™, and techmagus™ over the years.